Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes

Finally! I finished a book. And what a great book it was!

Rachel Walsh is Irish by birth but has lived in New York for the past several years. Rachel wants to be trendy, fashionable. She wants to be with the popular people and be the life of the party. She loves a good time, and a little (ok a lot of) cocaine. Everyone does, right? When she ends up in the hospital from an overdose, her family snaps to and sends her to the Cloisters, a rehab center in Ireland. Rachel expects a glamorous holiday, surrounded by celebrities and mud baths. She doesn't need rehab, because she doesn't have a problem, but to appease her family she checks in.

This book is so well written. The plot swaps back and forth between her experience in rehab and her life in New York, with each of them building to the inevitable conclusion. You feel the urgency with which Rachel craves her drugs and the denial and anger when she finally sees the truth. It's not always easy (for Rachel) but the writing makes it very clear what she's going through, and what it's like to face an addiction and recover. Rachel grows up a lot, she learns how she came to be an addict, and how live with it. She makes mistakes and moves on. She learns to apologize and to forgive.

The secondary characters in the book are excellent. Luke is wonderful, Brigit is perfectly flawed, the sisters have distinct personalities. The conflict with her mother is heartbreaking.

I really really liked this book. At nearly 600 pages this was not a quick book, but I am glad that I read it. I have known a few addicts and this book gives me insight into why they behave the way they do. I trust the author knows her stuff, as she wrote a great essay in Under the Duvet about her own experience with addiction and recovery. I will definitely be looking for more of her books!

This book was part of the TBR challenge.

Weekend Reading

I got some reading done this weekend, yay! I spent a lot less time online than usual and had time to read. We also did a lot of little family things, which was fun. So what did I read?

Last week I read Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes. This is a little collection of essays about just about everything. Some of them are pretty light (shoes!) and some are pretty heavy (there is a really good one on being an alcoholic.) It was a really quick little book, with lots of humor. She reminds me a little of Meg Cabot, but I can't put my finger on why. A lot of the essays were previously published, mostly in 1998 or 1999, so it is a little dated. It got me geared up to start Rachel's Holiday, also by Keyes, for my TBR challenge. So far, Rachel's Holiday is very good. I will use this one for my M author. 3/5

Yesterday after sorting my books for the Themed Lists post, I moved a couple of the shorter books to the top. I figured I have to get some reading going or I'll just have more and more staring at me. I started Statements: True Tales of Life, Love, and Credit Card Bills by Amy Borkowsky during naptime and managed to read almost all of it before the Monkey woke up. The premise is great, the author uses her American Express bills to recreate her life and we get to read all about it. In practice, it's not so great. The chapters are anywhere from 2 to 6 pages long, and sometimes it's quite a stretch to make the purchase into a story. About 15 pages in (so soon!) I almost gave up, but decided that since it was so easy to read I'd keep going. About 80 pages in I wasn't any more impressed, but I'd already read nearly half so I kept going. By the end I knew I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It just wasn't interesting. I give this one a 2/5.

Today I picked up Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris. This is the fifth book in a series by a tried and true author. While I think the previous book was better, this one had some great moments. Lots of the secondary characters are fleshed out and Sookie is (of course) tested more. I'm a bit nervous about the amount of sexual tension (no actual sex, sorry) between Sookie and the various guys. Until this book I thought Harris did a great job of making me love all the potential suitors, in this one a couple of the guys dropped out for me. I LOVE Sam, and Eric. Oh, and Quinn. 4/5

Hopefully I can keep up the pace this week and finish up a few more!